“The earrings? I wanted to give you something.”
“Why?”
He looked at me, a long, silent time.
“What will happen, if I stop running from you?” I asked.
Still no words. Then he looked away.
I almost felt guilty for putting him on the spot. I knew that he didn’t mean to be hurtful; he was all about fun. I stood up and put on my jacket and tried to sound calm and normal. End this pleasantly. “Thank you for lunch. I hope you have a great time in L.A.”
I walked out, fast, but he caught up with me at the light. I jay-walked, faster, across Sixth Avenue. He was still with me.
We came to the big fountains outside Spender-Davis. I stopped and turned and he was right there, too close. I lost my balance but he caught me. I pushed away from him. “Please! Why won’t you just leave me alone? I don’t know what you want from me!”
I hated myself. Hated the furious, hurt look in his eyes.
“I w-w—” He stopped. Closed his eyes.
He inhaled and tried again. “I w-wa—”
I stood there appalled, frozen, thinking, Don’t try to help him, you’ll make it worse.
He stopped trying to answer and just looked at me and it was incredible, how much he looked like his fierce-eyed Valkyrie sister. He walked away, jaw and fists clenched.
I don’t remember walking through the revolving doors into the building or following Edward onto the elevator.
“Oh, Edward.” I covered my face and sobbed, sinking bonelessly against the wall. I couldn’t say any more. There was nothing else to say.
For the next couple of days I spent most of my time in the living room armchair by the window, watching the winter sky. It was gray. Everything was.
Ed offered to stay with me but I sent him away, promising to answer when he called. Which turned out to be every two hours.
At one a.m. the first night I answered and said, “Ed. Go to sleep.”
“Why don’t I sleep over there?”
“No, thank you.”
“Are you still in the chair?”
I didn’t answer.
“I think I should call your mom, or Peg.”
“No.”
“Did you eat anything?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“What?”
It took me a minute. “Cap’n Crunch.”
“You’re lying. I know when you lie, Grace, you’re terrible at it.”
“Ed, I love you.”
“Just tell me you’re not going to die.”
“It kind of feels like I might. Please. I just need to be still for a while.”
“Fine. I’m bringing breakfast at seven.”
At 6:45 he rang downstairs, rousing me from my fetal curl in the armchair. I shuffled over and buzzed him in. Opened the door.
Ed came up the stairs looking tired and worried, carrying a bag of chocolate croissants and a package of plus-size Depends. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t bear to see that flame-stitch upholstery messed up.”
I smiled.
Ed brightened considerably.
bird’s-eye view
I loved my new job.
I was sent out to learn community sex ed with a woman named Lakshmi Sharma. She was a few years older than me, originally from Delhi, but had been living in the States for almost twenty years. A little heavyset, pretty, with big brown eyes, thick, short black hair, and perhaps the driest, most unsmiling sense of humor I’d ever encountered. The kind where at first you think the person hates you, until she unexpectedly pats you on the back.
Although I was going to be working with seniors, Lakshmi made sure I learned how to teach everything.
“This,” she said, holding up a box of emergency contraceptive pills, “is a big one. It keeps you from conceiving if you take it right after you’ve had sex. Saved my sister’s ass a time or two when she was uncareful. I had a student who was date-raped, and she used it.”
One day before we left the office she handed me a piece of gum and told me to chew it. Then she fed me a spoonful of peanut butter. As I chewed them together, the peanut butter disintegrated the gum into a nauseating blob of slime in my mouth. I gagged and hawked it into the trash can under my desk.
“That’s what happens when you use vegetable oil as lubricant with a condom. It breaks down the latex. Do that demonstration with a group of kids, and believe me, they don’t forget.”
Another day she had a group of giggling, blindfolded eighth graders race each other putting condoms on bananas. She timed them with the stopwatch on her iPhone. At the end of class she served them banana muffins.
And then it was my first time teaching seniors. We went to a community center in the Bronx where the people spoke only Spanish. Lakshmi was fluent. I was sincerely trying.
During a break, a woman approached me. She spoke quickly, quietly, but I understood that she had contracted genital herpes a year ago and was too embarrassed to go to the doctor. In my clunky Spanish, I urged her to go to the doctor right away and tried to give her some basic information about how to avoid painful outbreaks. Then she muttered something about Crisco.
I leaned closer. “Mande?”
She told me again. I recoiled.
“Oh, no, no! Eso no es bien! Crisco! No, no.” Boy, now she had me worried and she was really stretching the limits of my Español. “Pienso que . . . usted quiere mantener las lesiones limpias y secas así que se puedan curar y dejar de existir. . . . Si ponga Crisco en las lesiones usted las tendrían para siempre tiempo.”
The woman looked frightened. Lakshmi, standing nearby, spoke to her in rapid Spanish. The woman smiled with relief at Lakshmi, looked askance at me, and went back to her seat.
“What?” I asked Lakshmi.
“You were doing good when you told her to go to the doctor, don’t eat crap, get a lot of rest, and don’t get sunburned. It went downhill when you said if she puts Crisco on the lesions she’ll have them forever.”
“Forever! I meant longer.”
“Yeah. I think she’ll be all right.”
At the end of the session, after handing out goody bags of condoms and lube and packing up our materials, I said, “Look, I probably shouldn’t teach Spanish-speaking people.”
“Maybe not by yourself, yet,” Lakshmi said. “Repeat after me, rr-roja.” “Roja.”
“Rrrio.”
“Rio.”
She scowled. She wanted me to roll my Rs, but I am physically incapable. My tongue just lies there like it’s sunbathing on the beach in Cozumel.
Lakshmi patted my back. “Work on it.”
The next couple of weeks we went to retirement communities in the outer boroughs. I hadn’t actually spent that much time around seniors. I never knew any of my grandparents. My life experiences were so limited! Old people and small children were complete mysteries to me. It turned out that the old people I taught were generally extremely nice to be with. They told great stories. They asked good questions. They laughed, a lot.
After I completed the training and started doing workshops on my own and became more confident, my appetite came back full force. By March I had regained the seven pounds lost, plus an additional seven. All in my ass. I didn’t care. I wasn’t on the market.
The first day of spring was gorgeous, a bright promise that winter really was ending. Peg had brought in the mail and left mine, as usual, on the kitchen table. On top was a postcard from the Hollywood Wax Museum. I flipped it over. Tiny, packed handwriting.
Hey. They let me out for a meal and fresh air and I came here. Someone said they had a good statue of David Haselhoff. True! But Sammy Davis jr totally sucked! Its warm here and people are nice. I think you would like it. They gave me a place to live in that has a fireplace and a cleaning lady. She brought me homade tomalies! Bogue came out to visit for four days and she almost quit coz he is such a slob!!! Gotta go sing for my supper now. Take care. TGW
I sat at the table and absentmindedly picked up a pencil and started making correctio
ns. I mean, why so many exclamation marks? And Hasselhoff. Davis, Jr. It’s. Homemade. .
Coz—where to even begin?
Peg came in and stood at my elbow for a moment before I realized she was there. I peeked up at her. She looked rather incredulous.
I set down the pencil. “This looks bad, doesn’t it?”
“Um, yeah. Slightly nuts.”
“Ha! Reflex, I guess. I just—honestly, I’m kind of bemused. I’ve never seen so many bizarre misspellings—”
“Step away from the postcard, Grace.”
“Okay, yeah. . . . Okay.”
I turned down five dates. One from a guy I sometimes saw at the Strand bookstore on Saturdays. The other four were from Felix, the Puerto Rican kid who bagged my groceries. I’d heard through the neighborhood grapevine that he was a sociopathic computer genius. He’d gotten into big FBI trouble for hacking into major retail websites but was only sentenced to community service and psychiatric rehabilitation because he was a minor.
Our exchanges at the register went something like this.
Felix: Hello, my love. (He is bagging my purchases. He kisses, and then bags, my box of tampons.)
Me: Hello, Felix. Don’t do that.
Felix: When are you going to let me show you a good time?
Me: I’m not.
Felix: Come on, baby, why?
Me: Because you’re fifteen and I’m twenty-nine? As a starting point.
Felix: You know that only makes me like you more.
Me: It’s never going to happen.
Then he would abandon his workstation to follow me out of the store and down the block, sweet-talking me and threatening to hack into my e-mail.
I needed to find another grocery. But this was so close. And the only one in the neighborhood that did double coupons.
On a Sunday night in late June, Peg and I ran down to the drugstore on the corner for snacks. We had created our own little film series and committed to watching all the films of Ingmar Bergman. Tonight we would screen the epic Fanny and Alexander.
There were too many microwave popcorn options. The angel on Peg’s shoulder delicately pressed us to buy the kind with no oil added. My tiny red fiend stamped his cloven hooves! He wanted lots of movie theater butter, and was willing to get ugly about it.
Then a distinctive voice intruded. Peg and I abruptly forgot about popcorn and turned to the ceiling-mounted television.
A music video. A close-up of Ty’s face, photographed in sepia tones.
I knew the song he was lip-synching. He’d played it on the piano under the deer head for me that Sunday morning last November. Only now it was so much more, almost an eighties-style power ballad. And there were words. I heard them in a blur. I couldn’t hold on to most of them, but they made my stomach feel awful.
Now he was no longer in close-up but sitting in a booth in a seedy diner, alone, staring at his untouched food, singing about missing someone’s smell. Now walking down a deserted country road, barefoot, in ragged jeans and beat-up T-shirt, carrying a guitar. Sad. Yearning. Soulful.
Now a girl, ethereally lovely, with long, wavy, blond hair, barefoot and wearing a skimpy little calico slip-dress, slowly comes to him, meeting him in the middle of the dusty road. She is crying. She touches his face. The guitar falls to the ground in slo-mo and the beautiful girl is enfolded in his arms and they stand there on the road, entwined. The camera pulls away, way above them, bird’s-eye view, and keeps going, farther out, till they are just a tiny, satellite-picture speck at the last note of the song. The title caption, in the lower left corner of the screen:
Tyler Wilkie
“Something Sacred”
Album: Innocence and Experience
“Well,” Peg said. “How about that.”
“Yeah . . . wow.”
“His song is in the Top Ten.”
I looked at her. “How do you know that?”
She shrugged. “I saw it online. He’s going on tour in the fall with some other bands.”
Peg bought the Matinee Idol Double Butter. We walked home silently. And while she popped the corn, I went into my room, sat at the computer, and Googled “Tyler Wilkie Something Sacred lyrics.”
Oh, look, he had an official website, with a lyrics page.
our final stand
a mountain breeze
you kissed my hand
and left me on my knees
so long ago
I still can see
how you were mine
it’s in my memory
I need you tonight
don’t think I’ll make it
I need you tonight
wanna hold you naked
I need you tonight
we got something sacred
oh why?
longest night
lost again
I find your eyes
and they won’t let me in
I miss your smell
and our history
back in your spell
and all your mystery
I wonder why
I feel the same
and if you cry
when someone speaks my name
you took so long
for my heart to find
it’s all but gone
leaving it behind
I was shaking.
How could he?
How could he use our excruciating, private moment for commercial purposes?
I laid my head on the desk and wept. Suddenly it was all so clear: the moment in the woods hadn’t done to him what it had to me. It hadn’t shredded his guts and left a permanent, smoking hole in the middle of his chest. It was just another sad, beautiful moment from his life and it was fair game for public consumption.
I should demand a share of the royalties.
I heaved a final, shuddering sigh and sat up and blew my nose.
Somehow I made it through the movie, although I couldn’t say what actually happens. There was a blond lady, and two kids. A mean, bad husband, toward the end of the story. I think there might have been a ghost.
After the movie I said good night to Peg. Got into bed with my laptop. Checked my e-mails. Then, for masochistic kicks, went to www.tylerwilkie.com.
The website had the same Ansel Adams feel of the “Something Sacred” music video. Sepia and black-and-white photography, set among rough-hewn backgrounds and locations, with falling-down shacks and wildflower fields and boiling, dark, about-to-burst cloudy skies. And this beautiful man standing in the foreground, gazing back at me, dark-eyed and direct. Or in pensive, close-up profile, eyes closed. Hair blowing across his face. They had made him look so lovely, so carelessly masculine. They had plenty to work with, of course.
I watched the “Something Sacred” video again and wondered if he might be dating that stunning girl in real life. She appeared to be really crying, and they seemed so in love, so relieved to find each other at the end.
I clicked on the Music link and heard other songs from his album, among them “Her,” the lovely song he’d played in my living room while I’d been trying to write about wallpaper. At the end of “Her” I took a moment to lower the laptop lid and regroup. I should not keep looking at/listening to these things. They hurt. But I needed to know what was happening to him.
There was a Tyler Wilkie fan forum. With over five thousand members. How had all of this developed so quickly?
I clicked on the “Talk About Tyler” forum and skimmed the day’s discussion topics:
Pics of Tyler live at the Knitting Factory LA
I met Tyler last night!
sexy Pics of TW
lyrics to . . .
Ty on Jay Leno
Live and Unreleased Recordings
are we sure he isn’t gay?
TW on tour?
You Tube Interview!
My friend hooked up with Tyler Wilkie
I clicked on that last one. The thread went something like this:
RMluvsTy: Hey! I’m
a newbie here. Two nights ago my bff met Tyler Wilkie at a bar on Melrose, in W. Hollywood. She said he was pretty wasted. He bought her a drink and then they went out to her car.
TyTyTy10: Damn! Lucky girl! What happened?
RMluvsTy: Um, “heavy petting.”
Mesha3: what does that mean?
TyTyTy10: It means she blew him.
Mesha3: ewww.
RMluvsTy: They talked and stuff, too.
WilkWoman: We’re not supposed to talk about his personal life on this forum. It’s disrespectful.
TyTyTy, you’ve been warned before.
TyTyTy10: What? I didn’t start this one. It’s not my fault he’s a man-ho!
TLTy2: He’s a man, yes, and SINGLE. And plenty of girls are making themselves available. He’s not a ho!
RMluvsTy: My friend said he was nice.
Mesha3: he is nice, i met him at the garlic festival. he signed my CD and ticket and my shirt and my mom took my picture with him.
TyTyTy10: Nice and horny. Heh! RM, what about his, uh, “dimensions”. Did your friend say anything?
RMluvsTy: She said he was HUGE. But honestly, she hasn’t seen that many, so he might just be average.
Grace Grows Page 18
